On RPG Elements

I want to talk to you about RPG elements. This really is becoming to mainstream video games what the iPhone is to all my mindless trend-following friends. I’m not sure how this particular trend got started. A part of me wants to say Resident Evil 4, but overall it’s creeped up so gradually I hardly noticed, like the Nazi party.

I’m referring to the practice of acquiring “points” of some kind throughout the game, and assigning them to stats representing your abilities or equipment, gradually improving them in various ways. And I’ve lost count of recent mainstream action games that have boasted this feature. Arkham Asylum. Wolfenstein. Red Faction Guerrilla. Ghostbusters. Both Infamous and Prototype. And of course Darkest of Days, whose RPG elements were so blatantly token that they look like the short kid wearing an over-sized leather jacket in a vain attempt to join the big boys’ club. You can level up your skill with pistols or rifles, and that’s it. Sadly, no option exists to level up the entire game.

I appreciate that between this and my rant on overcomplexity a few weeks back I’m starting to sound like some kind of ageing video game Luddite. But as weak as this argument may sound, I’m not.

I’ve got nothing against RPGs, believe me. I’m all about customizing my gameplay experience. I especially like games with customizable appearances, a la Saint’s Row 2, and I know it shouldn’t matter but the experience is somehow greatly improved when my avatar looks like me in a dress. My well-established antagonistic relationship with JRPGs stems largely from the fact that most JRPGs aren’t RPG enough. There isn’t any role-playing – you’re always some poorly-dressed teenager who looks like a cross between David Bowie and Meg Ryan. You have no control over their motivations, nor, often, on their stat upgrades when they level up. So I’ve got plenty of time for RPGs when I’m in an RPG sort of mood. Just not when I’m in any other sort of mood.

OK, it works for some games. Arkham Asylum uses it pretty well, leaving aside the issue of how Batman never leveled-up during his previous however-many years of crimefighting. Every time you level up, choose a little upgrade from a list, chop chop and off you go. But then, Arkham Asylum was keeping a lot of balls in the air. It’s the straightforward shooters that suffer. The weapon-upgrading systems from Wolfenstein and Darkest of Days really don’t fit in.

For starters, it’s selling the game short. In today’s age adult gamers have busy professional lives and child gamers are all hopped up on Ritalin and sugary breakfast cereals, so first impressions are important. And the first impression will be a game full of poorly-balanced guns made from glue and sand, with aim waver like there are hummingbirds worrying at your fingers. Horrible weapons becoming more effective over time is kind of the exact reverse of a difficulty curve.

For main course, it forces you to invest in weapons that may become obsolete. Resident Evil 4 pulled a very mean dick move – after spending the first chapter blowing sackfuls of zombie farmers’ stolen pocket money on upgrades for the shotgun, rifle and pistol, suddenly the merchant remembers he has some better models you can trade in for, which have to be upgraded from scratch. So you either write off the upgrades as a loss or stick stubbornly to the inferior models, and then who’s the Luddite?

And for pudding, different weapons are used at different times. Upgrading RPG-style only makes sense if you’ve got several methods for dealing with the same problem – that’s when you choose what sort of character you are. That’s role playing. But in a shooter, if you’re faced with snipers and have been plugging all your points into shotguns and pistols, then you get to eat shit on toast.

That’s all I’ve got to say about that. Next week: why HD is a fad, and why we should all go back to living in the treetops playing Atari 2600.

“A violent game was refused classification because of outdated legislation, therefore a police state can only be just around the corner.

Interesting logic there.”
– harhol, from last week’s XP comments

You may have an irritatingly sarcastic point, but this is the thin end of a wedge, and I bet if more people had spoken up around the time Hitler was still gigging the beer-hall circuit then a lot of unpleasantness could have been avoided. But I didn’t have much space last week to talk about the real issue: the Australian government’s attempts to ban the Internet.

Okay, not ban the Internet, just those bits of it the government don’t like. That’s a big article I linked there, so let me give you the highlights reel. Various forms of the Australian government have been working on creating a national Internet filter that would block all access to blacklisted sites by anyone within Australia (with the added bonus of reducing Internet speeds nationwide by an estimated 20%). Ostensibly this would be to stop child porn, but exactly what qualifies a site for addition to the blacklist is a matter the government continually fails to clarify. Under half of the sites on the given blacklist were related to child porn. Most of the rest were perfectly legal, normal, wholesome grown-up porn.

Other sites added to the proposed blacklist included ones related to suicide methods, pro-anorexia, voluntary euthanasia and anti-abortion, and whether or not you agree with anything these sites promote, they all represent individual choice. They also propose to block websites that sell banned material. This would include sites like PlayAsia.com, which I frequently use to import US-released games that have been refused classification here. Attempts have even been made to ban or restrict scrutiny of the filtering proposal itself.

That is what scares me. Of course, the proposal has been heavily criticized, would create crippling technical issues, is almost impossible to enforce, and probably won’t even go ahead in the end. But the point is, they really, REALLY want to do this. And if they can do it here, someone could do it ANYWHERE. Like, say, YOUR country. Also, there’s a BEAR behind you. RUN.

Yahtzee is a British-born, currently Australian-based writer and gamer with a sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder. When he isn’t talking very fast into a headset mic he also designs freeware adventure games and writes the back page column for PC Gamer, who are too important to mention us. His personal site is www.fullyramblomatic.com.